What is cloud computing?

Remove limits on your business

Cloud computing is a shift in traditional computing that gives businesses on-demand access to a variety of software and services while giving IT a shared pool of configurable computing resources at the platform, infrastructure and application layers. When done right, cloud computing helps businesses do more, faster by letting them tap into the power of massive datacenters and IT services without having to build, manage or maintain them.

Why cloud computing?

Because it lets IT offload complexity and burden, letting your team focus on addressing the growing demand for new applications, new devices and new solutions for the resulting data explosion. In this fast-paced world of more devices, more apps and more data, IT is more challenging and exciting than ever. IT can answer this call for “more, faster” with cloud computing – so your employees can deliver new projects and products, manage more devices easily, crunch more data quickly, and spin up dev and test environments faster.

Microsoft is committed to delivering the broadest array and depth of cloud computing solutions to businesses worldwide through three key areas:

First, the consistent cloud computing platform is built to realize our vision of a unified platform for modern business, which we call the Cloud OS. At the heart of the Cloud OS is Microsoft Azure, an open and flexible cloud computing platform that enables you to quickly build, deploy and manage apps across a global network of Microsoft-managed datacenters.

You can build applications using any language, tool or framework. And, with System Center, you can integrate your public cloud applications with your existing IT environment. For companies wanting to build their own private clouds (on-premises), Windows Server and SQL Server, as well as System Center come into play.

Second, we deliver a cloud computing productivity suite in the form of Office 365 that offers the best and deepest productivity experience available today, spanning business intelligence, unified communications, email, collaboration and social capabilities.

And the third key delivery is a suite of business solutions through Microsoft Dynamics that deliver easy-to-use cloud computing and private cloud solutions for CRM and ERP to help organizations grow fast while managing costs.

Expect more from the cloud

Microsoft believes you shouldn’t expect any less from the cloud, you should expect more. Yet, some cloud computing providers are asking you to make compromises – on ease of use, on feature sets, on hybrid, and more. When you’re making a choice to adopt cloud, you should work with a company with the experience, reach and footprint you can trust fully. Because Microsoft has a long history of running internet-scale services, we give customers the best of the cloud, on their terms, without compromising on capabilities.

While we believe, over time, many services will move to the cloud, today, most businesses live with the reality that they need both on-premises and cloud services. That approach to cloud computing is called hybrid cloud computing. True hybrid cloud ensures your past IT investments are leveraged, not lost. Others may talk about it, but Microsoft delivers hybrid cloud computing.